Find the courage to unearth your true voice and let your inner beauty shine for the world. Live from your heart. The world needs your medicine.
Rumi
Imagine you have chosen to mark a life transition with a wilderness rite of passage ceremony. Three phases await you: severance, threshold, incorporation. Severance is the leaving behind of your life at home as you venture out into the wilderness. Threshold is the solo time of the journey: perhaps a 24-hour solo fast during a week-long gathering, or a 4-day solo fast in a longer program. Incorporation is the return home: bringing back into daily life whatever insights or visions you received while out alone.
It is often said: The hardest phase of a rite of passage ceremony is the last, incorporation.
Several of our EarthWays guides offer one-on-one ecotherapy counseling to help people with this kind of incorporation work. How does a person interweave wisdom revealed while out in nature, with the humdrum of daily life?
This one-on-one support may be done in one of two basic ways. One version starts as a more traditional form of counseling work, into which the counselor/guide brings an ecotherapy perspective—perhaps inviting the client to do a day solo walk in nature to deeply explore an issue or question. In its fullest form, this ecotherapy work has the counselor/guide offering support before and after a person does a wilderness solo fast. Sometimes that solo fast will be co-led by the same counselor/guide, though this is not essential.
EarthWays guides offering one-on-one ecotherapy work
Cynthia Morrow: Having practiced psychotherapy for over 25 years and working as a wilderness rites of passage guide for 15, I bring a deep comfort in witnessing and reflecting the vulnerability and passion of peoples’ life experiences. Sitting with folks on the land brings an intimate expansiveness, as we include the presence of trees, animals, wind and rocks to help reveal how one’s heart and soul are being moved by life. In one-on-one ecotherapy work, we might address major life transitions or simply meet the ever-unfolding nature of one’s becoming more whole.
www.natureofsoul.com cynthia@natureofsoul.com
Deborah Greene-Jacobi: I am a wilderness rites of passage guide, a mentor to teens and adults and a host and carrier of the Circle Way. In my one-on-one ecotherapy work I am inspired by the transformative power of wild nature as a source of healing and as a mirror of our our human nature. Through practicing deep listening and compassionate witnessing, I bring wholehearted passion to supporting individuals and families through major life experiences and transitions. I offer guidance and earth based healing practices to teens coming of age as well as parents seeking to hold and honor their son or daughter’s initiation into adulthood. Based on my own direct life experience I offer support and counsel to those facing the diagnosis and treatment of cancer and life threatening illnesses as well as those who have lost a beloved…be it friend, sibling, parent, child or partner. We go to the land together and also alone to reflect and listen deeply to nature’s wisdom for courage and healing.
Scott Eberle: I am a hospice physician, a wilderness guide, a rite-of-passage counselor and a writer. A great portion of my life work has focused on offering guidance, counseling and support to people making major life transitions – be it any of “the little deaths” encountered throughout life, or “the Big Death” that awaits us all. This transitions work is not just something I do for others. In my own life, I show up as consciously as I can whenever I’m making a major life transition: the end of a job or relationship, the loss of a friend or family member, or the debility caused by a major illness. When I’m called to help others, I bring great passion, deep listening, and a lifetime of insights.
http://scotteberle.net seberle@sbcglobal.net
Vanessa Eyen: The counseling work I offer often focuses on supporting big life transitions, including from adolescence into adulthood, the move into motherhood, finding one’s right livelihood of work, and more recently, going through divorce. This work takes shape through walking and being in beautiful places in nature together, understanding one’s story through self reflection and reflection through nature’s mirror, and helping people to identify what they are letting go of, what they are creating and what their special gifts are. I bring to this work deep compassionate listening and an ability to reflect the essence and soul of what I am hearing—all while looking to help weave in nature as a teacher, mirror, and source of healing. I invite people to safely listen to their bodies to hear its wisdom, and I offer support in feeling painful emotions, often calling in the support of the earth. I invite my clients to bring their curiosity, an open heart, and a willingness to grow and to heal.